Democrats wimp out yet again!

For decades guys like us have been giving small amounts of money to the Democratic Party and to specific Democratic candidates only to be deeply disappointed by the timidity of many Democrats on core party issues.

This cowardice was certainly on display in the mid-term elections, and the country (and the world) is going to be paying for this mistake for years to come. Mitch McConnell beat Alison Grimes by a 57-43 margin.

Grimes, and a whole bunch of other Democrats, ran from Barack Obama like he himself was the chief carrier of the Ebola plague.

According to a recent poll, 42 percent is Obama’s current level of approval by the electorate. By relegating Obama to the status of an Untouchable, Grimes picked up 1 percent of the vote.

Alison, it wasn’t worth it. Most of the Democrats who ran away from Obama gave their power to the Republicans. They bought into the Right’s line that Obama is not a strong leader, implying that his presidency is a mistake. They should have been running toward Obama and what the Democratic Party stands for, thereby putting real issues back on the table.

Think about the impact it might have had if the Democratic message throughout the country had been something like:

“Of course I voted with Obama! Do you really want to put the party back in power that immersed us in two wars and plunged America into the worse economic crisis since the great depression? Here’s a just-getting-started list of accomplishments ... ”

•Creating affordable health care: Countless millions who never had health care before, now have it. It is portable and affordable and neither you nor your children can be denied health care because of pre-existing conditions.

•Pulling us out of the economic hole the Republicans got us into when they squandered Clinton’s budget.

•Creating many millions of new jobs over an uninterrupted 50 months of job growth. (Don’t believe it? See Adam Hartung’s column in the Sept. 5 issue of Forbes called, “Obama Outperforms Reagan on Jobs Growth and Investing.” http://tinyurl.com/kacty2x.)

•Bringing the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan and fighting to re-build the Veterans Administration..

•Executing the international terrorist criminal, Osama bin Laden.

•And all of this happened in spite of the obstinate foot-dragging of the Republicans. Have you ever tried to drive a car forward with the parking brake on? All you get is a lot of noise and a really bad smell!

“And, you say he hasn’t been leading?! Ha! Think about what we might have accomplished if the Republicans hadn’t been stonewalling every attempt at progress that Obama put forward, such as tax reform, immigration policy, or regulating climate warming pollution from coal-fired power plants”

All of the polls said people were angry and frustrated with Washington. By running away from Obama, the Democrats gave away their power and essentially said, “Yep, it’s his fault.” They rolled over in face of the Republican narrative.

By seeming to agree with the Republican message and, in many ways, running against Obama, many Democrats deprived the public of anything to vote for. They gave us nothing to be proud of.

By panicking and thinking solely of saving their hides in the mid-terms — which most were unable to do anyway — many Democratic politicians abandoned everything we, the folks who pay for the party, believe in and in the process, jeopardized the 2016 election. They’ve even created the conditions for the repeal of Obamacare, one of the most important and positive pieces of federal legislation in our lifetime.

The rout of Democrats like Grimes, who didn’t even have the guts to say who she voted for in 2012, has emboldened the agenda of a political party that has promoted income and social inequality, voter suppression, hostility to science and no limits on or transparency of money in politics.

Obama is not perfect, but that is not the point.

By acting like losers and not standing with their own president, the Democrats have opened the door to painting Hillary Clinton as a loser too, rather than as the next great leader of the Democrats who should be the first female president.

Even had they lost (and we don’t believe the loss could have been much bigger than it was anyway), the Democrats would have stood for the incredible successes of the last six years and hammered that message home, rather than running scared and letting the Republicans bludgeon Obama and making the whole party look like wimps who can’t stand up for themselves, let alone the American people.

We want our money back.

Mark Horowitz of Weston, Mass., is the author “The Dance of We: The Mindful Use of LOVE and POWER in Human Systems.” Michael Sales of Newburyport, Mass., is the co-author of “Life Sustaining Organizations — A Design Guide”; he grew up in Louisville, where his family operated businesses for more than 100 years.